Derren Brown Showcases A Victorian Era Spirit Cabinet | Derren Brown's Séance

If you want to take part in this seance, you will need a pen and paper, a wine glass, all the letters of the alphabet on separate slips of paper, or you can use scrabble tiles, and a flat surface like a table. You'll have time to assemble these later on. Good evening. Tonight we're here at Elton Hall in East London, which until 1983 was used as a training centre for medical students, and since then it's laid abandoned in the middle of a busy street. I would ask you at home to involve yourself in this seance, and I've also invited 12 students from around the country to participate in tonight's events. Now the 12 students were chosen by placing advertisements around different universities, and there was a particular sort of person that I was after that would most authentically replicate the sort of people that would go to Victorian seances. First of all, they had to be open-minded about the paranormal. I also held a series of suggestibility tests to choose the people I felt would be most responsive to the idea of a seance. The temptation at home may be to believe these people are stooges, but they're not. They have no idea what's going to happen beyond the fact that we're going to attempt a seance, and by the end of tonight all but one of these students will be dead. That's not true. I'd give them about a week. Seances date back to the 1800s after three sisters by the name of Fox claimed to be able to contact the dead. They toured America with their demonstrations and attracted the rich and famous, and by the end of the century seances had taken off all over the western world. Spirits were manifested, tambourines flew, ectoplasm impossibly erupted from entranced mediums. Then after 40 years of this, rather embarrassed by what they'd started, one of the sisters, Margaret Fox, confessed that they were frauds. The miracles which had started it all off had been a scam. But her confessions made very little difference, and spiritualism continues to appeal to many people today. I don't believe in spiritualism personally. I find it quite ugly, but I am interested in the sorts of techniques used by fraudulent Victorian mediums, and I'm interested to see whether these techniques can be used to affect a modern sceptical audience. So let's go meet our guys. Hello everybody. Welcome to Elton Hall. Hope you enjoy your evening. Can you come through with me into this room here? Thank you. You want to sit in the first couple of rows? Okay, thank you. All right, so before we start, I just want to try something very quickly with you. What I'd like you all to do is to have in your mind the name of somebody you know who has died, somebody who's passed on, and information about that person. Really have this right in the front of your mind now. What their name was, what they looked like, what interests they had, what their relationship was to you as well. Will you all think of somebody for me? Just sort of do that now. Have that in your head. Great, okay. And really concentrate on that person. Really have an image of... Yep, great, so I can do this with you. All right, thank you. Look at me for a second. So the person that you're thinking of, it's a lady, isn't it? Yeah, and this is somebody who died when they were fairly old, I think. And as you imagine, this is quite a shortish lady, and I think quite large. You sort of remember sort of fairly large glasses when you think back to it, yeah. And when you think about her, something about flowers? What's that? Yeah, something... Did she collect flowers? I know, the flower shop. She's owned a flower shop. That's really interesting. Great, and she... It was your grandmother, yes? And her name is Laura or Nora? Noreen? Nora. Yeah, Nora. Nora, excellent. Yeah, thank you. Okay, all right, so what you've just seen there is a fraudulent technique used by mediums in the Victorian times. There's a trick to it, in a way, okay? But in your head, you make it convincing, and that's what's important. And a lot of seance really is about this, you know. I am very skeptical about a lot of spiritualism, but I would ask you tonight just to join me in a spirit of open-mindedness and exploration, all right? So let me explain why I've gathered you all here today. On February the 27th, 1974, a tight-knit clique of 12 students gathered in a room downstairs, led by this guy, Nicholas Gad. Let me just show you that picture. I'm going to show the camera, and I'll pass it around so you can all look at it too. On a given signal from Gad, who was a particularly charismatic member of the group, they drank between them eight pints of bleach. It was a suicide pact. Within half an hour, they were all dead. That's all of them apart from Gad, who survived and moved to Australia, and some years later, he died in a car crash. Now, since that incident 30 years ago, there have been over 40 reports of paranormal phenomena, hauntings and sightings and so on in this building. Now, that may be no more than just coincidence and imagination. Whatever you believe, it's a little disconcerting to be here in the building where these guys lived and died. As we do this also, I would ask you at home to really make the decision to involve yourself in tonight's experiments. There will be a number on the screen that you can call, and please do call if any strange things happen at home that you want to tell us about. Please do call. All right, so one particularly theatrical item that grew out of the Victorian seance period is the spirit cabinet. That's what this is here. All right, you can see it's fairly simple. The medium would be tied up and restrained inside the cabinet. The curtain would be closed all around, and then bizarre paranormal phenomena would occur inside the cabinet, supposedly outside of the medium's control. For example, a tambourine would move and jangle around, or spirit writing would appear on paper, supposedly from the spirits themselves. And of course, sceptics suggested there was some kind of trickery involved, and very possibly there was. So I'm going to try something tonight that hasn't been done before, and also shouldn't really be done, and that's to put essentially a member of the public in there, rather than me going in there or a medium going in there. Okay, so I'd like to try this, I think, maybe first of all with you, if I can. Is that all right? Would you want to just come around for me and come and stand here? Excellent, thank you. It's Jess, isn't it? Yeah, that's right. You see, when you sit in that cabinet and the curtain closes, your state can absolutely just change in an instant. It's very interesting. Would you take a seat for me just there? Excellent. Thanks for doing this, by the way. Yeah, look at me. Yeah, I'm very happy for you now to do this yourself. Look at my hand. And you can just start to get yourself into a nice, relaxed, sort of like a trance-y medium state that they used to go into, so that the spirits can just play. Excellent, very nice. Put your hand there, and your hand there, and your feet flat on the floor. Very good. I'm going to move these around you, closing the curtains on all sides. I want you to remain in this state. Just tell me, did you move the tambourine then? Did you touch anything? Did you even move? No. Be absolutely honest. Come back to me first of all. Just open your eyes. Just come back to me. Come back to me. Good, thank you. All right, did you touch the tambourine? No. No. Did you throw it out the curtain just then? No. No. Sure? Yeah. Okay, come over a second. Would you absolutely swear blind that you did not touch that tambourine? I'm positive, yeah. All right, did you move at all? No. No. All right, excellent, thank you. Where's it gone? It's over there at the moment. You heard it? Did you hear it move? I heard noise. You heard noise, but you didn't touch it? No. All right, let me just show you first of all, there's a CCTV camera up there. Okay. We were actually filming that from above. I want to demonstrate something to you here, and show you exactly what did just happen in the spirit cabinet. Follow me up here. You need to turn so you can see this. Do I need to rewind this? It's rewound. It's rewound, okay. Just stand here for me. Okay, now first of all, that is you, yes? Yes. Not an actress. We've got dressed in the same clothes. That is you, yes? No, that's me. Bring your hands and your legs. You definitely didn't touch the tambourine? I didn't touch it. All right, okay. I didn't do that. I didn't do that. That's you, yes? Yeah. Did you pick it up and throw it out? No. I swear to God, I didn't do that. I didn't do that. How does that feel then, watching that? Confusing. But that is definitely you? Uh-huh. Yes? Yeah, but I didn't. Honestly, I didn't touch it. All right, have a seat for a second. It is weird, and it is unsettling. It's unsettling because your mind can play this trick on you and make you do things that you've got no awareness of. This is what used to happen in many Victorian seances. The medium would produce phenomena which were fraudulent, but she herself wasn't really a fraud because she had no memory of doing it. She had no awareness of doing it. She absolutely believed they were real. This is called unconscious fraud, and it explains a lot of these things that went on in Victorian seances. Thank you for doing that. I realize that's a bit freaky to say. Yeah, so do you want to go? Maybe. Yeah, okay. Okay, how'd you go? Cool. Take a seat just there for me. Okay. In the spirit cabinet. So first of all, we're going to rule out the possibility of any trickery. I'm going to ask you to keep your eyes open, right? You'll be able to see everything, and I'm also going to rule out the possibility of unconscious fraud by restraining you in the chair. Okay. Okay? Yeah. Okay, no trickery. You keep your eyes open. No unconscious fraud. You can't move. Okay? Let's check if it's tight. Yeah. Great. Yeah. Okay. So we're just going to give him a few seconds. Did you just move the curtain? No. Did you all see that? Absolutely. Well, you can't because you can't move your hands, and you can't kick that high. I can't reach it at all. All right, okay. No! Okay, okay, hang on, hang on, hang on. You've broken it. You've broken it. What happened? What happened? I don't know. I just needed to get out. I don't feel right. That's really weird. Talk me through it. You're shaking. Yeah, I don't know. I was sat there. Yeah. You shut the curtain, and I just freeze, man. You all right? Feel. Yeah, feel. Yeah, you should all have a feel. Seriously. You all right? Yeah, I'm all right. I'm all right. Yeah. You broke the, uh, the strays. That was a tough luggage strap. That was really, really weird. That built up, that, I just had to get out. Okay, I'm going to take a break, and I'll talk to you and make sure that you're okay. Yeah, cheers. All right? Okay, cheers. So there's a number on the screen. I want you to ring the screen if you feel anything untoward is happening at home. For the next part, you're going to need a pen and paper and something to lean on. We're going to take a few minutes break and see what about. Okay, have a safe minute. Let me just.